Contemporary Mise en Scène

Staging Theatre Today

Patrice Pavis, Joel Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136448508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

'We have good reason to be wary of mise en scène, but that is all the more reason to question this wariness... it seems that images from a performance come back to haunt us, as if to prolong and transform our experience as spectators, as if to force us to rethink the event, to return to our pleasure or our terror.' – Patrice Pavis, from the foreword

Contemporary Mise en Scène is Patrice Pavis's masterful analysis of the role that staging has played in the creation and practice of theatre throughout history. This stunningly ambitious study considers:

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• the staged reading, at the frontiers of mise en sc è ne;

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• scenography, which sometimes replaces staging;

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• the reinterpretation of classical and contemporary works;

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• the development of intercultural theatre and ritual;

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• new technologies and their usage live on the stage;

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• the postmodern practice of deconstruction.

But it also applies sustained critical attention to the challenges of defining mise en scène, of tracking its development, and of exploring its possible futures. Joel Anderson's powerful new translation lucidly realises Pavis's investigation of the changing possibilities for stagecraft in the context of performance art, physical theatre and modern theory.

1 Where did mise en scène come from?

Origins and theory

Must we, once again and almost obsessively, return to the origins of mise en scène? Its appearance and the circumstances of its development were masterfully described by Bernard Dort forty years ago in a well-known article on the ‘Sociological condition of theatrical mise en scène’.¹ A shift in the constitution of the audience or audiences obliged the theatrical establishment to call on the director to adapt work for the new needs of the stage. According to Dort:

it was only in around 1820 that we started to talk about mise en scène, at least in today's usage of the term. Previously, to direct (mettre en scène) meant to adapt a literary text with a view to theatrical performance: the mise en scène of a novel, for example, was the stage adaptation ofthat novel.²

From 1828, the art of mise en scène, for example at the Théâtre de l'Ambigu, had its own muse, Sénéis, establishing it as an art in its own right.³ But such dating is itself a subject of debate. According to recent research by Roxane Martin, the term was already in use at the time of the French Revolution.⁴ Nevertheless, it is only in the 1880s, with Zola and Antoine (although they were following in the footsteps of the Meiningers from as early as 1868) that the director became the uncontested master of the meaning that emanates from the stage.

These disagreements around precise dates only confirm the problem of situating in time what is, in a strict sense, a new function, but one which is old in the sense that there was always, from the Greeks onwards, somebody charged with looking after the material aspects of the performance. Aeschylus himself thus wrote for specific acting conditions, composed the music, led the chorus, and took care of the costumes. In the middle ages, the ‘maître du jeu’ coordinated the elements of liturgical drama. The capocomico of the commedia dell'arte would decide the order of sequences and the general conduct of the performance. Molière was an actor and, as seen in the no doubt somewhat romanticised account of L'Impromptu de Versailles, was also in charge of interpretation — the director of actors, as we might put it today.

Despite these historical precedents, linked to the very practice of staging, we should reserve the term mise en scène and especially that of director (metteur en scène) for stage practices from the 1880s onwards, since the era of directors did not start before Zola and Antoine ‘s radical critique of theatre or before the counterpoint provided by symbolism (at least in the context of France). This is why it will be useful to return for a moment to these early years. We will do this more from the perspective of a theorist preoccupied by current stage production that that of a theatre historian, even if the two functions can be difficult to separate.

In French theatre criticism, we note a general increase in the use of the term ‘mise en scène’, which has ended up referring to ‘theatre’ in general, or to a specific production on a stage or elsewhere. We will try to reserve this term for a system based on theatre performance, or the way in which theatre is put into practice according to a definite aesthetic and political plan.⁵ It is one thing to recognise that staging Aristotle's opsis, or ‘representation’, plays a role at every point in theatre's history. It is another, however, to grasp the epistemological break of the 1880s and 1890s, which gave mise en scène its new status, beyond the idea of mere stage representation that is as opsis or mimesis.

Before undertaking a brief overview of a few different phases of mise en scène, we should carefully make the following distinctions between terms that are often used interchangeably.

• The représentation (the stage performance or production) is the concrete, physical and empirical object produced by the actors, the director and the creative team. Représentation also contains the idea that the stage re-presents, meaning it presents for a second time and renders present what was absent. Theatre is conceived as the repetition of an idea or of a pre-existing reality. Here one can observe a huge difference between this term and the English term ‘performance’: ‘performance’ suggests that the action is accomplished by way of the stage, and the stage cannot automatically, as is the case with the French term, be reduced to a question of the imitation of the real.
• Spectacle is the representation of different kinds of practices (which are sometimes called ‘cultural performances’ in English). The performing arts only make up a small fraction of all these cultural performances. Theatre is no longer merely, as Richard Schechner suggests, the string quartet of the twentieth century.
• Mise en scène is thus a performance considered as a system of meaning controlled by a director or a collective. It is an abstract, theoretical notion, not a concrete and empirical one. It is the tuning of theatre for the needs of stage and audience. Mise en scène puts theatre into practice, but does so according to an implicit system of organisation of meaning.
• Performance, in the French use of the term (which translates roughly as ‘performance art’), is often an autobiographical genre where the artist attempts to deny the idea of ‘re-presentation’, enacting real, rather than fictional, actions, presented only once.
• La direction d'acteurs (the directing of actors) is a more recent term: it is the working relationship during rehearsals between the director and the actors (or other artists).⁶

The tendency among historians (such as Jean-Marie Thomasseau or Roxane Martin) is to go back to the start of the nineteenth century, or even the eighteenth century, to locate within the working methods some embryo of mise en scène. The acting was already to a great extent determined by the actors, and not according to any fixed tradition.⁷ Our thesis here, however, will remain that mise en scène experienced an epistemological break around 1880 and that it thus took on its modern meaning, still signifying the passage from the text to the stage it is true, but increasingly doing so while enjoying the status of an autonomous art.

These details of terminology in place, we must again momentarily become historians, if only the better to understand current practices in theatre arts, practices that, as we will see, owe a great deal to the beginnings of mise en scène, to the moment where the modern world and its theatre were invented. This phenomenon is located in history at a given moment, and should not be reduced to mere performance or to the simple coordination of materials.

Mise en scène is a new notion, even if we could study in any period the specific way in which the different elements of performance are combined and interpreted:

There was of course theatre before what we today call ‘mise en scène’, but something new — noticeable, sketched out, and sometimes required, in previous centuries — was institutionalised at the end of the nineteenth century: the art of mise en scène practiced by directors. Whatever one thinks of its genesis, of its nature, and of its virtues, the art of mise en scène constitutes today the horizon of the art of theatre, just as geometrical perspective constituted that of Western painting, from the renaissance to the nineteenth century.⁸

It is a good idea to check continually, within each linguistic and cultural area, the meaning of all these terms, since they vary a great deal from one language to the next. ‘Performance’, in the French sense, has little to do with the usual meaning of the word in English, which is precisely untranslatable into French. As for mise en scène, which in French designates the totality and the functioning of the performance, it is usually limited in English to the visual environment of the scenography and the objects: ‘This term is used to describe the director's role as visual story teller; how they choose to arrange the objects and scenery that the designer has supplied in order to create the desired environment.’⁹ UK or US encyclopaedias nonetheless point to a recent extension of the notion beyond spatial arrangement:

Strictly speaking, when applied to the techniques of stage representation the term refers to painted scenery, scenic effects, stage pieces, and properties. But it has a more expansive meaning, signifying not only the stage setting but also lighting, costuming, and all other related aspects of the spatial and temporal order of a theatrical performance. In this more comprehensive meaning, mise en scène refers to what happens in the spatial-temporal continuum, including the actions and movements of all the performers (actors, singers, or dancers) who provide the dynamic rhythm of the production. In the modern period, the role of the director is to organise all of these elements into a unified art-work.¹⁰

In this sense mise en scène and Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk are related, both evoking all the features and principles of a theatre presentation, from language, speaking, and music, to gesture, movement, and design.

A brief survey of the origins of mise en scène should assist us in understanding the provenance of contemporary mise en scène practices.

The origins of mise en scène: historical landmarks

Emile Zola

The ‘invention’ of mise en scène clearly did not happen overnight. It came in the wake of a long and severe critique of the state of the theatre. Throughout the reviews, later collected in Le Naturalisme au théâtre, Zola becomes the mouthpiece of a profound dissatisfaction at the lack of new authors and the mediocrity of the condition of the stage. He is one of the first theatre reformers. Paradoxically, the crisis of authors, and their inability to show the world in its brutal detail, attracted and formed the basis, almost accidentally, of the naturalistic mise en scène of the future. Zola's critique begins with the actors, who he sees as slaves to ridiculous conventions, such as ‘overly formal and grotesque entrances and exits, characters that always speak facing the audience.’¹¹ The actors ‘play to the audience’, ‘as if on a pedestal.… If they lived the plays instead of playing them, things would change’,¹² but ‘the actors do not live the play; they declaim it’; ‘they strive for personal success without any interest in the rest of the cast.’¹³ Not only are they not directed as a group, as a director would like, but they are also not integrated into a ‘detailed set [which] emerges as the necessary milieu of the work’.¹⁴ The stage will thus have to reconstitute this milieu that determines human action, taking the risk of making scenography the ‘spillway’ of the text, the place where all the details of the milieu must be made visible. Such is nonetheless the function of naturalist sets: ‘They took on in the theatre the importance that description took on in the novel.’¹⁵ The use of gas from 1820 and electricity from 1880 led to the ability of light to sculpt an entire stage universe that appeared autonomous and coherent. Everything is therefore put in place to insist that theatre be reborn according to the new directives of mise en scène.

André Antoine

In the spirit of Zola, Antoine, considered France's first director, identified the same ‘causes of the current crisis’ (1890): the authors were mediocre and repetitive; their work performed in uncomfortable theatres where the prices were too high, they were betrayed by stars, ham-acting while surrounded by poorly trained actors, in companies lacking any cohesion. Having observed since 1874 the historical precision of the naturalist and authentic work of the Duke of Meiningen's Meininger troupe, Antoine retained that group's precise sense of detail, but also the unity of the acting and the integration of the actor within the set.

In ‘Causerie sur la mise en scène’ (1903),¹⁶ Antoine gives one of the first systematic demonstrations of the mise en scène of his dreams. We find in this reflection on mise en scène a range of questions applicable to the brand new notion of mise en scène, questions that have not lost any of their significance today, so that we might still draw up a systematic list. Let us choose a few of these then new, and still relevant, points. Historical perspective should help us to follow the evolution of forms across the century, and notably the current mixture of aesthetic principles and styles.

Antoine distinguishes the role of the director of the theatre and that of the theatre director. In the old role of a ‘hired hand’, paid by the directors to ‘sort out the play, do the preliminary work that they no doubt consider to be of little interest’,¹⁷ he sees a vital task, but one that is still barely understood — that of giving the work its first, decisive interpretation, ‘the overview’.¹⁸ But it is very difficult ‘to find theatre artists who compel themselves to this fascinating but obscure task’.¹⁹ In the early days of this new science, the director thus faced a task that was both obscure and thankless, since he still felt a responsibility towards concerned authors and famous actors. Antoine gives a few rules for directing actors, and then describes the stages of work. He cleanly divides the task into two distinct parts: ‘the first is entirely material: that is the constitution of the set serving as a milieu for the action, the design and the blocking of the characters; the other is immaterial, that is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contemporary Mise en Scène
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Where did mise en scène come from? Origins and theory
• 2 On the frontiers of mise en scène
• 3 The difference between mise en scène and performance
• 4 Tendencies in French scenography
• 5 The mise en jeu of contemporary texts
• 6 The intercultural trap: rituality and mise en scène in the video art of Guillermo Gómez-Peña
• 7 Theatre in another culture: a Korean example
• 8 Media on the stage
• 9 The deconstruction of postmodern mise en scène
• 10 Physical theatre and the dramaturgy of the actor
• 11 The splendour and the misery of interpreting the classics
• 12 Staging calamity: mise en scène and performance at Avignon 2005
• 13 Conclusions: Where is mise en scène going?
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index